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Photo Gallery: Grassland Landscapes

Winter Wheat, Colorado

Rows of winter wheat wind their way to the Colorado horizon. Because North American grasslands have such fertile soil, most of the natural landscape has been converted to farmland.

Prairie Dog, South Dakota

Photograph by Raymond K. Gehman

A black-tailed prairie dog perks up outside his burrow in South Dakota. These playful rodents live in well-organized underground burrows called towns that can have populations in the thousands.

Grassland and Hills

Photograph by Raul Touzon

A storm rolls in over New Mexico grasslands with the Sangre de Cristo Mountain in the distance. All the land between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River from Texas to Saskatchewan used to be a giant expanse of prairie.

Terraced Rice Field

Photograph by Peter Essick

Terraced fields like these have been used by different cultures around the world for thousands of years to farm areas of sloped land that are too steep for conventional methods.

Prairie Fence

Photograph by Bruce Dale

An early winter snow dusts grasslands in Paradise Valley in Montana. This land was once Native American territory, inhabited by Lakota, Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, and other Plains Indian nations.

Sunrise Tinted Sky

Photograph by Phil Schermeister

Dawn illuminates Little Missouri National Grassland in North Dakota. As many as 60 million bison once grazed these lands. Today only about 200,000 remain.

Lush Grassland

Photograph by Jozsef L. Szentpeteri

Lush grasslands spread their seeds in the wind around the town of Hajdudorog in Hungary. The world's grasslands ecosystems all have common characteristics, yet each boasts unique plants and animal species.